Lucid (LCID) earnings This autumn 2022

Electric vehicle start-up Lucid announced on September 28, 2021 that it has begun production of its first cars for customers at its Casa Grande, Arizona facility.

Clear

Electric Vehicle Manufacturers Clear reported fourth-quarter sales on Wednesday that fell short of expectations after just 7,000 of its Air luxury sedans were built last year amid manufacturing challenges. But the company expects to make between 10,000 and 14,000 vehicles in 2023.

Shares of the company fell about 7% in after-hours trading.

Here’s what the company reported for the fourth quarter of 2022:

• Loss per share: 28 cents
• revenue: $257.7 million vs $303 million according to Refinitiv consensus estimates

Lucid’s quarterly sales mark a sharp increase over the same period last year when the company had just started production of the Air sedan, bringing in $26.4 million. The company’s bottom line also improved, coming in lower than the 64 cents a share loss it posted in the year-ago period.

The company ended the year with about $4.4 billion in cash and about $500 million available on lines of credit, enough to last through the first quarter of 2024, Chief Financial Officer Sherry House told CNBC. Lucid had $3.85 billion in cash as of September 30; it raised an additional $1.5 billion from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and other investors via a share offering in December. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund owns about 62% of Lucid.

Lucid said in January it produced 7,180 vehicles in 2022, well below its original expectation of 20,000 for the year but enough to beat its lowered August forecast. Before the end of the year, however, only 4,369 of these Air sedans were delivered to customers.

“Our goal in 2023 is to increase our sales and marketing efforts to get this amazing product into the hands of even more customers around the world,” said CEO Peter Rawlinson.

Lucid said it had more than 28,000 reservations for its vehicles as of Feb. 21, up from “over 34,000” reservations in its last update on Nov. 7.

The company said in April that the Saudi Arabian government had agreed to buy up to 100,000 of its vehicles over the next 10 years. These vehicles are not included in the reservation totals.